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Fifty images of H.M.S. Belfast, a museum ship moored in the City of London. The images are presented as framed prints as well as bound in a hand-made book, with text from the Litany of Loreto.
50 Views of H.M.S. Belfast looks at the way that our acculturated experience of our own bodies frustrates an experience of the sublime. I have dealt with this subject in a number of previous pieces using the motif of the battleship: a self-contained world unto itself, entirely man-made, at once defensive and isolated on an apparently barren ocean. From this point of view the body becomes a mere shell to protect and transport the mind. The apparent hostility of its environment (the sea) is only true for one who never penetrates the surface. This dislocation of the body is most clearly seen when the body has been absorbed into a social or political complex, for example the royal body, or the sacred body. The body of the Queen is not her own, in terms of health, sexuality and procreation it is a model of the state.
In the case of 50 Views of H.M.S. Belfast it is the body of the Virgin Mary that is referred to. Each image in the series has a unique title taken from the fifty titles of the Virgin to be found in the Litany of Loreto. The images themselves are fragments of a battleship, the H.M.S. Belfast, a museum ship in the city of London. They have been digitally manipulated to mimic the aesthetic of boudoir photography. The skies and backgrounds of each image have been replaced with skies photographed over the city of Los Angeles. By doing this I have tried to eroticise the battleship, putting it’s form in the place of the female body, a body which our culture presents to us as both a site of sensuality and an alienating vessel.
Fifty images of H.M.S. Belfast, a museum ship moored in the City of London. The images are presented as framed prints as well as bound in a hand-made book, with text from the Litany of Loreto.
50 Views of H.M.S. Belfast looks at the way that our acculturated experience of our own bodies frustrates an experience of the sublime. I have dealt with this subject in a number of previous pieces using the motif of the battleship: a self-contained world unto itself, entirely man-made, at once defensive and isolated on an apparently barren ocean. From this point of view the body becomes a mere shell to protect and transport the mind. The apparent hostility of its environment (the sea) is only true for one who never penetrates the surface. This dislocation of the body is most clearly seen when the body has been absorbed into a social or political complex, for example the royal body, or the sacred body. The body of the Queen is not her own, in terms of health, sexuality and procreation it is a model of the state.
In the case of 50 Views of H.M.S. Belfast it is the body of the Virgin Mary that is referred to. Each image in the series has a unique title taken from the fifty titles of the Virgin to be found in the Litany of Loreto. The images themselves are fragments of a battleship, the H.M.S. Belfast, a museum ship in the city of London. They have been digitally manipulated to mimic the aesthetic of boudoir photography. The skies and backgrounds of each image have been replaced with skies photographed over the city of Los Angeles. By doing this I have tried to eroticise the battleship, putting it’s form in the place of the female body, a body which our culture presents to us as both a site of sensuality and an alienating vessel.
